Scandals: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

the 2016 presidential election or as it's more commonly known the electoral equivalent of seeing someone puking so you start puking and then someone else is puking and pretty soon everyone is puking 2016. the first presidential debate is tomorrow night more than a hundred million people could be watching two candidates whose campaigns have been defined less by questions about their policies than their ethics every day is another drip drip drip of scandal for hillary clinton another clinton scandal too many scandals have followed her and bill clinton over the years what about the trump scandals another trump campaign scandal another booming scandal of the day with him but there are so many it's hard to keep track listen we have had scandals during campaigns in the past from barack obama's financial dealings with tony rezko to george w bush's air national guard service to the revelation that dwight d eisenhower's middle initial stood for deez nuts but but this campaign this complaint the scandals have been so pronounced polls show that less than half the electorate sees either candidate as honest or trustworthy and you may not like either candidate for good reasons but if you are still somehow torn about which one to vote for and are factoring their scandals into your decision we thought it might help to spend tonight walking you through them so let's start with hillary clinton the woman who if she loses will sit there motionless not speaking until she eventually dies and i do know that even talking about her scandals will irritate some of you given that her opponent is an unambiguously racist scarecrow stuffed with scrunched up copies of jugs magazine and that's fair that is a fair point but not being as bad as donald trump is a low bar to clear and if you focus on nothing but him you fail to vet a woman who might be president and if you believe the internet she's guilty of everything just click around and you can find such masterworks as hillary clinton uh hillary ordered the murder of the children of waco hillary the butcher of benghazi and my personal favorite is hillary clinton satan hillary i am the devil and you know that's in quotes on the internet so she must have said it although although to be fair she could have been referring to her time as the new jersey devil's mascot now now many of hillary's most famous scandals have been heavily litigated in the past for instance uh whitewater now more than six years of investigations by three different prosecutors and multiple congressional committees failed to find sufficient evidence of wrongdoing then there was benghazi now eight congressional investigations broadly concluded the state department could have done more to increase security at the embassy but non-found evidence of wrongdoing by clinton and then there is the problematic issue of the swiss file transfer and while yes investigators found hillary was in zurich at the time of the transfer and documents show she was aware the transfer took place and yes the clintons did have something to gain financially from it the fact is the swiss file transfer is something i just made up right now but the very fact that for a second you kind of remembered it says something about the tone of coverage surrounding clinton but many but many rational people are still worried about two particular scandals it turns out nearly half of all americans are very concerned about both her emails and the clinton foundation so let's start with the emails which you may remember from their starring role at the republican national convention she put our nation's security at extremely high risk with her careless use of a private email server hillary clinton cared more about protecting her own secrets that she cared about protecting america's secrets she jeopardized the american people our national security with her secret email server she lied okay hillary's emails were basically the unofficial theme of the rnc right alongside how loud can giuliani scream and happy days residuals can't buy you attention but but while some of hillary's opponents feel her email scandal should put her in prison at least at the beginning she claimed there was nothing to see everything i did was permitted there was no law there was no regulation there was nothing that did not give me the full authority to decide how i was going to communicate and people across the government knew that i used one device maybe it was because i am not the most technically capable person and wanted to make it as easy as possible and now i think it's kind of fun people get a real-time behind-the-scenes look at you know what i was emailing about and what i was communicating about now that is a bad answer for a number of reasons first she says everything i did was permitted which isn't remotely true the use of a private email server would have required prior approval and she never asked for it then she blames not being technically capable which is a fine excuse for your dad when he accidentally text you the letter q 10 times but it's pretty shitty coming from a secretary of state and then she caps it off by saying the whole thing is kind of fun which it definitely isn't unless every single one of her emails was just a jpeg of a dog dressed as dracula in which case yeah you know what that is kind of fun so there have been exaggerations on both sides and while she since acknowledged that her use of the server was a mistake the idea persists that it was a good deal more so let's walk through what we actually know hillary clinton this started due to a simple tech issue because when she took office in 2009 department issued blackberries couldn't access two different email accounts clinton said today it was more convenient for her to carry one device instead of separate devices for work and personal emails looking back it would have been better for me to use two separate phones and two email accounts i thought using one device would be simpler and obviously it hasn't worked out that way yeah no so this whole situation could potentially have been avoided if she just had the ability to carry two blackberries meaning it's the only time the best advice a politician could have received was cargo shorts so if she wanted one phone she had a few options first use a state.gov email address for all her emails meaning her personal emails would reside on government servers potentially making them more accessible to request for public records so instead hillary sent everything through a non-government address it's a practice that's legal but highly discouraged although she is by no means the only one who has done that others include colin powell john kerry chris christie jeb bush rick perry scott walker martin o'malley greg abbott bobby jindal sarah palin ashton carter and karl rove and epa administrator lisa jackson had a different work around using a second government email under the alias richard windsor which turned out to be a mashup of her dog's name and her family's hometown so she was basically doing government business under her porn name which cannot catch on because nobody wants to be writing to housing and urban development secretary julian castro at bud.thunderjunk at hud dot bone that can't happen but hillary went much further than just having a private email she had her own private server and it wasn't just any old server to put an email server at your house is not a it's a complicated thing yeah but it was already there it had been there for years it is the system that my husband's uh personal office used when he got out of the white house and so it was sitting there in the basement wait wait you used a server that bill clinton had been using which was in your basement i hate to tell you this but you just stored government records on a machine that bill called the pawn master 5000 i love that machine old faithful now the private server wasn't the only way hillary communicated there was a separate official government system for classified information unfortunately some email sent to hillary did contain pieces of information that were classified in nature the fbi found 113 such emails though in fairness only three of them had classification markers and were not in the header of the email as they should have been and while the fbi found clinton and her staff to be extremely careless they said they couldn't find a case that would support bringing criminal charges so it's not good but it's not as bad as it looks which is never a satisfying thing to hear or indeed read above the buffet at a golden corral so so that is basically the emails let's now move on to the clinton foundation six months ago it was known as the top-rated global foundation that has among other things helped millions around the world access lower-cost hiv treatment but it has now become possibly the only charity that inspires more visceral anger than this one eight seven seven seven shut up shut up what is this charity your kids you can't drive what money laundering scheme are you operating look the point is the point is the controversy with the clinton foundation is not so much what they did with their money it's the possible conflict of interest in taking donations from individuals and foreign governments with business before the state department and to be fair in 2008 the foundation tried to head this off by promising the obama administration they'd not only disclose all donations but also get advance approval for any coming from certain foreign governments which they did but a few slipped through there's one involving algeria donating half a million dollars although there's no proof that state department policy was swayed as a result more concerning is one involving russia which does sound bad reports out overnight say the state department with clinton at the helm approved the sale of one of america's largest uranium mines to russia at the same time a foundation controlled by the mines chairman was making donations to the clinton foundation we are talking about some big money here four separate donations totaling 2.35 million dollars and these reports say that the donations were not publicly disclosed holy there are so many not good words in that one sound bite russia uranium controlled big money and not disclosed it could only be worse if it also contained the words orifice shard butt chug and cosby now now brace yourself because this gets pretty dense basically the canadian chairman of the mining company that was eventually sold to russia had also given money to the clinton foundation but instead of doing it directly he gave it through this canadian affiliate which didn't disclose his name because it didn't have to because the affiliate wasn't actually included in that agreement the clinton foundation signed with the obama administration so neither the law nor the agreement were technically violated though the spirit of the agreement definitely was so again this looks bad especially given that the state department did sign off on the sale of that uranium mile to russia but not only was hillary not involved in that decision but eight other federal agencies plus the nuclear regulatory commission also had to sign off which they did so this donation was legal but very annoyingly handled and any suggestion of pay for play fails to account for the separate actions of nine unrelated government agencies basically it's complicated and like the movie it's complicated it probably would have been best for everyone if it had never happened but no one broke the law and look we've spent several frustrating weeks trawling through all the innuendo and exaggeration surrounding her email and foundation scandals and the worst thing you can say is they both look bad but the harder you look the less you actually find there's not nothing there what is there is irritating rather than grossly nefarious and this is where it's instructive to compare her to her opponent donald trump america's wealthiest hemorrhoid because if you are struggling with the idea of voting for hillary because of all this you need to take a long hard look at trump if you're irritated by her lying that is understandable but he is quantifiably worse politifact checked around the same number of statements from both of them over the years and found around 13 of hillary's statements to be flatly false but for trump that figure was a whopping 53 presumably it's only that low because the rest of the time you were saying things like this if ivanka weren't my daughter perhaps i'd be dating her you know it's so weird yeah that's probably true and the fact is probably true is what makes it so horrifying and if you're thinking okay hillary may not lie as much as trump but she needs to be more transparent that's fair enough but bear in mind we know almost nothing about trump's finances and that is not good he's the first major party nominee since 1980 not to release his tax returns and his justification is pathetic i will absolutely give my return but i'm being audited now for two or three years so i can't do it until the audit is finished but yes you can the irs has explicitly said you don't need to wait for a completed audit to release them you're just saying two completely unrelated things or i'd love to pick you up from the airport but i can't because a blue whale's tongue weighs as much as an elephant what the are you talking about those two things have nothing to do with each other and and on top of trump's personal tax records there are unanswered questions about his business dealings as many experts have pointed out his investments debts and business ties span the globe and could present unprecedented ethical challenges for a president now traditionally presidential candidates in that kind of situation promise to put their financial holdings into a blind trust where an independent trustee is given control over their investments but when trump was asked if he would do that as well he seemed not to know what it meant are you planning on putting your assets in a blind trust should you become president i have ivanka and eric and don sitting there run the company kids have a good time i'm going to do it for america so i would i would be willing to do it so you'll put your assets in a blind trust i would put it in a blind shot well i don't know if it's a blind trust of ivanka don and eric run it but is that a blind trust i don't know no that is not a blind trust it's the opposite of one almost anything else you could have said would have been closer to a blind trust oh i'm going to put my assets in an upside down dog house filled with pudding is that a blind trust no that's ridiculous but you're actually closer than you were before and even more alarmingly when george stephanopoulos talked to donald trump jr he didn't seem to understand what a blind trust was either it's not a blind trust if you and your siblings are still running we're not going to be involved in government we wouldn't even know the you're running the company and he's president so any foreign but he's not making any decisions as it relates to the company but a blind trust it's not a blind trust if it's being run by his children it is because he'll have nothing to do with it george he's still going to know what the businesses are and where they are we will not understand because we're not going to discuss those things it doesn't matter trust me wait trust you the only reasonable thing to trust you on is which hair products can best make someone look like a 1980s serial killer that's it and look if the financial actions of the clinton foundation annoy you let me introduce you to the trump foundation and i'm not talking about the estimated 12 pounds of foundation that trump wears on his face i'm talking about his charitable organization the washington post has been investigating and has found among other things that trump has not personally given it any money since 2008 and just this week this story broke donald trump is facing questions tonight about his charitable foundation after a report today in the washington post the foundation spent more than a quarter of a million dollars of donated money to settle lawsuits against trump businesses yes trump reportedly used his foundation's money which had been donated by people for charitable purposes as a tool to make some legal disputes go away are on the spectrum of shittiest things you can do that is right up there with catfishing a baby owl he waited all night for you and he's nocturnal so that's his day gone uh and trump also allegedly used foundation money to purchase ridiculous items for himself in another instance trump's foundation paid ten thousand dollars at a charity auction in 2014 for a portrait painted of trump it was the second time trump used foundation funds for a portrait of him okay okay okay wait wait wait wait just for a start what is he doing with his face in that photo that is not a smile that's waking up in the middle of a colonoscopy and also on top of that how did that portrait cost ten thousand dollars it looks like someone xeroxed a black and white picture of trump and then painted over it with condiments from burger king now now what trump did there would technically be legal as long as the portrait itself was put to some charitable purpose well univision found it and it wasn't exactly in an orphanage this is the painting that donald trump purchased with funds donated to the charitable foundation that carries his last name this morning univision got the scoop that the artwork remained hanging inside the restaurant champions bar and grill inside the doral hotel and golf course a property owned by donald trump now in trump's defense that portrait is the perfect pairing for his restaurant signature dishes which are apparently according to yelp reviewers watery tomato chunks with no flavor and craft beer brands misspelled on the menu and it is not just portraits trump also wants to use foundation funds to buy a signed tim tebow helmet a steal at twelve thousand dollars for something that once contained the head of america's worst quarterback he also used funds to make an illegal political donation to support florida a g pam bondi around the time that she was considering investigating his not a university university so it seems the trump foundation may exist primarily to benefit trump himself in which case they should really change the name to something more appropriate like the national association for the advancement of donald trump or the naadt for short and the thing is we have barely scratched the surface of his scandals there is everything from the ongoing lawsuits against that university to the alleged use of undocumented workers when building trump tower to the fact he received an illegal 3.5 million loan from his father in the form of a purchase of chips from one of trump's casinos and that loan could not have been shadier if it was given in baggies of cocaine or the bones of endangered species look the point is this campaign has been dominated by scandals but it is dangerous to think that there is an equal number on both sides and you can be irritated by some of hillary's that is understandable but you should then be outraged by trumps think of it like this ethical failings in a politician are like raisins in a cookie they shouldn't be there they disgust people but most politicians have at least a few raisins and hillary is a cookie like this one she she arguably has more raisins than average there's probably 10 of those little in there but we all need to remember that when it comes to donald trump this is the amount of raisins that he represents the man is a raisin monsoon he is ethically compromised to an almost unprecedented degree so if you don't like raisins i get it they're disgusting but unfortunately this november you're gonna have to swallow 10 or we're all gonna be eating this for years

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 17,709,763

Rating: 4.6097221 out of 5

Keywords: last week tonight, last week tonight with john oliver, scandals, john oliver scandals, last week tonight with john oliver scandals, john oliver hillary clinton, john oliver donald trump

Id: h1Lfd1aB9YI

Length: 21min 15sec (1275 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 25 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/CrudelyAnimated]

This is truly, truly how you get ants. I hope he wants ants.

[u/TheZixion]

I want John to release HIS tax returns so I can find out how many raisins he bought.

[u/Spacepickle89]

Aww I like raisins :(

[u/LeeRoooyJennnkiiins]

This is the longest I've paid attention to anything news-y with the word "Scandal" in it in months. Good job, Jon Oliver. You're a rat-faced bastard with a heart of gold.

[u/SuperFreakonomics]

Can't wait enough for this shit show of an election to get over.

[u/mjohn058]

The main message here is one of "false equivalency".

These two candidates aren't even close. Please, please, educate yourselves on the issues.

[u/jgyuri]

Confession Bear: I actually like raisins.

[u/[deleted]]

As much as Trump supporters hate to admit this, Trump is not honest or more ethical than clinton. He has boasted about paying people off to gain advantage. Yeah they both suck. Wish it was bernie up there but its not. Trump is more charismatic than clinton but if charisma is the main category that determines who should be president than Ryan Seacrest will be president in the coming years. Yes clinton is full of shit, yes she lies, yes she has done questionable things in the past and maybe will continue to do those things, but don't pretend trump isn't guilty of those things either.

The raisin analogy is such a good representation of this. Good job John Oliver!!

[u/Mediocritologist]

I mean, it's pretty much a given Trump won't release his taxes because he's not a billionaire like he says, right?